1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer equipped with a sheet discharge port for discharging a sheet on the upper surface of an exterior case, and particularly to a printer having a structure for preventing invasion of foreign materials into a sheet discharge port.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, printers have been used at various places, and some of them are used while set up in the neighborhood of water-associated places such as kitchens or the like. When a printer is used in the vicinity of such a water-associated place, water droplets may invade the printer from a sheet discharge port. When a water droplet invades the sheet discharge port, the water droplet infiltrates into a sheet before print, and blurs ink on the sheet, so that print quality is lowered. Furthermore, invasion of a water droplet from the sheet discharge port into the printer also damages the internal parts of the printer. If a foreign material adhering to the upper surface of the printer invades the printer from the sheet discharge portion, it may cause breakdown of the printer irrespective of whether the foreign material is a water droplet or not. Therefore, it has been strongly required to provide a structure for effectively preventing invasion of various kinds of foreign materials containing water droplets from the sheet discharge port.
Under such a requirement, a printer having a structure for preventing invasion of a water droplet from the sheet discharge port has been proposed (JP-A-2002-137493).
Here, the printer disclosed in JP-A-2002-137493 is designed as a clam shell type printer in which a front lid body and a rear lid body are opened/closed. In this printer, a sheet discharge recess portion is provided at the boundary portion between the front lid body and the rear lid body, and a slit-shaped sheet discharge port from which roll paper is discharged is provided in the sheet discharge recess portion.
A water discharge groove is formed in the sheet discharge recess portion so as to be located at a lower position than the sheet discharge port. A drain port is formed at the right end portion of the water discharge groove, and water flowing into the sheet discharge recess portion flows along the water discharge groove and is then discharged from the drain port to the outside of the printer.
However, the structure of the printer described above has the following problem.
That is, in order to discharge water flowing into the sheet discharge recess portion, the drain port must be formed at the right end portion of the water discharge groove and further an internal drain port for discharging the water flowing in the drain port to the outside of the printer must be provided. As described above, a complicated structure such as the internal drain port or the like must be provided in the printer, and thus a mold structure used to manufacture printers described above is complicated, so that the manufacturing cost is increased.